Chachapoyas is a very rural region, its capital town just have 25.000 inhabitants, the roads are generally unpaved and in bad condition, and it takes ages to arrive here, where the jungle meets the green side of the Andes.
There, some of the best remains of precolumbian cultures in Southamerica can be found... but you are not going to believe it... which is normal, there is no promotion of it from the peruvian goverment neither from private companies, and few people have been there... and that is also normal, because there is no way that this rural region could accomodate massive tourism...
However, that makes it even more special... for most of the excursions I had to share taxis with locals to go from one village to another... if there was a taxi and other passengers... otherwise I had to either wait (for hours..) or walk... The exception was the precolumbian site of Kuelap... there I could go with a tour operator.
One of the travellers I met in the tour to Kuelap was a man of 90 years old... peruvian, very charismatic... He has been travelling alone since he was 80 years old... he's been in most of Europe, Egypt, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Russia... and here he was... at 90 years old, able to do a thirty minutes hike up to Kuelap... while complementing the women in the group... we laughed about it, but he did so in a very respectful and educated way, the women liked him... Asked about why he travelled so much, he said smiling "I got trapped in the drug of traveling..." and one of the girls in the group replied "and the side effect is knowledge"...
Obviously, travelling you get to know more about the world, and I feel very lucky for having this chance... Some even would argue that you also get to know yourself... but I disagree... we usually just arrive to an opinion about who we are... What is true is that, when travelling, you change much faster than at home... and that is due to survival need, more time to think, meeting people from different cultures and maybe learning about other philosophies or ways of thinking...
The fact is that you change... so by the time you think you know yourself.. you are already different!... and when that happens you can feel a bit lost, because we don't like when our preconceptions don't fit reality, specially when it's about our own reality!.. but if you are lucky, you can realize that changing is normal, everything in the world is moving, changing.. and you are not the exception... As the emperor Marcus Aurelius said in his book Meditations, "The universe is change. Our life is what our thoughts make it"...
If you are ready to accept change, you don't think things will stay forever as they are... in every aspect of life you are more ready to improve things... and when things turn wrong, you are faster to recover and know that the problem won't last forever... because there is always the hope of change... and the most useful of changes is changing the way you look at things.
